A simple trick for recurring paper jams

Today in the busy PaperCut offices Peter was running tests of his PCL6 print job watermarking feature over our corpus of test documents. This involves quite a bit of printing and unfortunately we suffered a rather nasty paper jam. The first few attempts by us to remove the paper jam did not have the best results.

Then my System Administrator brain kicked in and I remembered two simple tricks that I thought I would share with everyone.

1) Be thorough!

When you have a difficult to remove paper jam in your device, keep all of the pieces of paper as you pull them out. Reassemble it like a puzzle. If you don’t have a complete page you have missed something!

By doing this we could tell that there was a remaining tiny piece of paper, somewhere deep in the paper path of our copier.

2) Use what’s at hand

That tiny piece of paper was no where to be seen. We could see where the paper was jaming but couldn’t see inside to remove it. Most of the time, fixing this is going to require either calling in a repair tech (if under warranty / service agreement) or pulling the entire thing apart.

What I’ve learnt is that using 150-200GSM paper and manually feeding it through the paper path by hand can often dislodge the offending piece. If I don’t have a piece of heavy weight card around I can simply fold an A4/Letter piece of paper in half, length wise, and feed that through. This tip has saved me many hours and more than a few dollars worth of service calls, not to mention my sanity!

That reminds me, when I sat back down at my desk an my PaperCut installation had notified me that the print was in error. Have YOU setup your PaperCut system notifications? These notifications can inform you of low toner issues, paperjams and much more.

Jason Clarke - Product Tester

Jason’s what we call a PaperCut ‘OG’. Over his 9 years with us, he’s hung out in support and internal IT before becoming a customer evangelist and product tester. We often see him putting on his ‘Customer Hat’ to catch those pesky bugs and improve their overall experience.
You’ll also see him putting on a helmet to feed his obsession with everything cycling.